Since 2016, the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) has been on a quest to learn more about learning—to investigate and find solutions to the challenges of knowledge acquisition, retention, and transfer. MITili’s approach is interdisciplinary, drawing from and sharing multiple perspectives across the Institute, and this past year, its successes have reflected the wide range of work being done in educational research.
Earlier this year, MITili Faculty Deputy Director Parag Pathak was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal for his work on providing equitable school choice. Granted annually by the American Economics Association to the best economist under the age of 40, the award honors both Pathak’s efforts to improve secondary education and the innovativeness of his empirical and theoretical techniques.
On the primary education front, MITili was instrumental in the formation of Reach Every Reader, a collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Florida State University’s Florida Center for Reading Research. Reach Every Reader aims of applying research-based personalization to make significant progress solving the crisis in early literacy. At the core of Reach Every Reader’s mission is the belief that blurring traditional student, teacher, family, community, assessment, and instruction boundaries builds better solutions.
MITili’s research into learning effectiveness for young learners didn’t start with Reach Every Reader. In a recently published study, MITili Faculty Director John Gabrieli and his team found that engaging young children in conversation is more important for brain development than simply “dumping words on them.” This research holds important implications for helping to bridge the socioeconomic gap faced by many students. Previously, the “30 Million Word Gap” study had shown that children of lower socioeconomic status would hear profoundly fewer words on average than their affluent counterparts. This gap in turn leads to significant differences in vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension later in life.
The new study emphasizes the importance of a child’s early life experiences, a period critical in shaping the brain structures and functions that result in cognitive aptitude. Language exposure is one critical aspect during this time, and includes language quantity (number of words heard) and quality (sentence complexity and lexical diversity). Conversational turn-taking of parents and their children is an important finding by Gabrieli’s team that suggests parents have a greater influence on their child’s language and brain development than previously believed. Regardless of socioeconomic status, all children have an improved chance to succeed if their parents have time to engage them in back-and-forth conversation.
Dr. Gabrieli and his team plan to use these findings as a springboard for further research into possible interventions that could incorporate more conversation into young children’s lives.